Contests and Prizes

News about Contests and Prizes, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times.

Chronology of Coverage

Jun. 4, 2015

Computer scientists organizing annual international competition for artificial intelligence technology bar researchers from Baidu, China's leading search engine, from contest; public announcement states that Baidu's team violated submissions rules in effort to gain unfair advantage over competitors; computer scientists express dismay over episode, which raises broader concerns about ethics in scientific research. MORE

Jan. 9, 2015

Dec. 17, 2014

Voting ends at 11:59 tonight to pick a winner from the 28 finalists who submitted opening passages for the actual noir-era novel “Tough Kid From Brooklyn.” MORE

Nov. 17, 2014

David Isay, founder of Brooklyn-based oral history project StoryCorps, is winner of 2015 $1 million TED Prize; along with prize, Isay will be invited to speak at annual TED Conference in March. MORE

Nov. 12, 2014

A man, a dame, a 1950s book cover: “Tough Kid From Brooklyn.” Tell us how the story begins. It’s City Room’s 2014 New York Pulp Fiction Contest. MORE

Nov. 10, 2014

Two teams of astronomers are awarded the $3 million Fundamental Physics Prize, richest science prize of all, for their research into dark energy; same two teams have already shared Nobel Prize and $1 million Shaw Prize, among other honors. MORE

May. 11, 2014

Apr. 18, 2014

Online gun sweepstakes and giveaways have become one of most useful tools for campaign outreach in 2014 Republican primaries; across country, candidates are using high-powered pistols and rifles as lure to build up their donor lists and expand their base of support. MORE

Feb. 28, 2014

Youth is cause celebre at Paris Fashion Week, with sour sense that the next generation of great designers has yet to come; newly established LVMH Prize will offer 300,000 euros (about $412,000) and industry mentorship to the winner of an open contest, provided he or she is younger than 40, and has at least two collections already in hand. MORE

Dec. 31, 2013

First $1 million Caplow Children’s Prize is won by Dr Anita Zaidi, Pakistani pediatrician who hopes to save hundreds of newborns in poor Karachi neighborhood of Rehri Goth. MORE

Dec. 19, 2013

Jeffrey Gonano, a 25-year old project manager in Wexford, Penn., won a 1914 Picasso gouache in an international raffle. MORE

Dec. 15, 2013

Annual All-Japan Phone-Answering Competition, half-century old contest in which office workers compete to answer the phone in the most polite possible manner, has surged in popularity; organizers attribute competition's appeal to enduring importance of politeness in Japanese culture, as well as growing concern among some employers that young Japanese are forgetting their manners. MORE

Nov. 18, 2013

Five finalists in ambitious design competition for public chairs that will be used in Battery Park at tip of Lower Manhattan are set to be announced; contest drew 679 entries from 15 countries, and winner will receive $10,000. MORE

Nov. 15, 2013

Rebuild by Design contest, held by Department of Housing and Urban Development, attracts engineers, architects, designers and others with proposals to protect the New York area from the potential damage of another Hurricane Sandy; winning proposals, which range from land use changes to building designs, could have inside track to billions of dollars in Hurricane Sandy relief money. MORE

Oct. 30, 2013

The Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin is inviting D.J.’s to remix its recording of Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony. MORE

Sep. 27, 2013

Jack Ma, the executive chairman of Alibaba, and his wife are joining some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names as sponsors of the world’s richest prize for medicine and biology. MORE

Sep. 22, 2013

Writer Esther Cohen recounts experience of responding to Craigslist ad in which anonymous donor offered $10,000 prize for single poem, to be chosen from among all those submitted; describes being chosen as one of 11 finalists and attending mysterious dinner party in honor of the winners. MORE

Jul. 17, 2013

Boston chef and restaurateur Chris Schlesinger and Valerie Gurdal, owner of South End Formaggio specialty food store in Boston, square off each year in a friendly backyard paella competition; Schlesinger wins 2013 competition, his first victory in five years. MORE

Jul. 10, 2013

Advertising column; retailer Target joined forces with technology blog of the magazine Fast Company to find a shopping app; group of developers from advertising agencies wins the top prize. MORE

Jul. 2, 2013

The Week column; Pentagon introduces competition, Darpa Robotics Challenge, to build robots that could rescue and evacuate people in disaster event; other significant developments in health and science news highlighted. MORE

Jun. 20, 2013

East Wing Journal; judges gather to evaluate 108 recipe finalists among scores entered in East Wing healthy recipe contest, part of First Lady Michelle Obama's continuing agenda to improve eating habits of America's children. MORE

Jun. 2, 2013

Billionaire Len Blavatnik and New York Academy of Sciences plan to announce three $250,000 prizes for young scientists, building on smaller seven-year-old program in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut; Ukranian-born Blavatnik, who immigrated to United States in 1978 and founded industrial group Access Industries in 1986, says he has always dreamed of creating Nobel Prize-like award for young scientists. MORE

Apr. 22, 2013

Minerva Project, San Francisco venture with lofty but untested plans to redefine higher education, says that starting in 2014 it will award annual $500,000 prize to faculty member at any institution worldwide who has demonstrated extraordinary, innovative teaching. MORE

Apr. 4, 2013

The Riverdale branch is still accepting names for two lazy-looking lion statues that have been installed at its entrance. MORE

Apr. 3, 2013

Federal Trade Commission names winners of its first Robocall Challenge, public contest to design system to stop unsolicited marketing calls from reaching individual's phone; winners Aaron Foss and Serdar Danis will split $50,000 prize. MORE

Mar. 13, 2013

Providence, RI, Mayor Angel Taveras wins $5 million for his city in contest among mayors, overseen by Bloomberg Philanthropies, involving ideas for improving their cities. MORE

Mar. 12, 2013

Sara Volz, high school senior from Colorado Springs, Colo, wins first place and $100,000 in Intel Science Talent Search for cultivating populations of algae cells with high oil content that can be converted into economically feasible biofuel. MORE

Mar. 3, 2013

Screenwriters who live in the United States may submit feature film proposals or completed short film scripts in a Beijing-based contest that aims to turn some of them into movies. MORE

Feb. 20, 2013

Eleven inaugural winners will receive the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, including $3 million purse that is the world's richest award for medicine and biology; prize was created by Internet titans Yuri Milner, Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki and Mark Zuckerberg. MORE

Dec. 11, 2012

Center for Communicating Science, organization founded at Stony Brook University by actor Alan Alda, announces second annual contest asking scientists to answer a question in terms an 11-year-old could understand; latest question is 'what is time?'. MORE

Dec. 11, 2012

Yuri Milner, Russian billionaire who describes himself as 'failed physicist,' is set to announce round of multimillion-dollar prizes to physicists; pair of $3 million prizes are awarded to cosmologist Stephen Hawking for his work on black holes and to seven scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, for discovery of what is probably the Higgs boson particle. MORE

Nov. 20, 2012

Documentary Ants Africa, about predatory ants, wins the Open category in the 2012 YouTube Your Entomology Contest, amateur filmmaking contest created in 2009 and sponsored by the Entomological Society of America. MORE

Oct. 21, 2012

Demand for infertility treatment is increasing, as is number of clinics offering it, and fertility clinics around country have begun offering promotions such as contests or raffles to garner free publicity; medical ethicists worry that contests exploit vulnerable people and trivialize human conception. MORE

Oct. 1, 2012

Theodore A Scott, winner of online contest sponsored by Coca-Cola tea brand Gold Peak Tea, is disqualified for using a Web site where people who enter crowdsourced digital sweepstakes ask members to vote for them; Gold Peak is just the latest company to try to create excitement for its brand on social media only to find that sentiment can quickly turn. MORE

Jul. 31, 2012

Catskill Park Resource Foundation announces five finalists in slogan contest as part of a campaign to rebrand New York State's Catskills region; winning slogan, which may be used in promotional campaigns, will be announced on August 25 and will garner a $1,500 prize. MORE

Jul. 6, 2012

Report by Roger Bootle and economists at Capital Economics in London is the winning entry in a contest to develop a solution to the euro zone crisis; prize in contest sponsored by Simon Wolfson is 250,000 pounds, or $388,000. MORE

Jun. 5, 2012

Austrian graduate student Ben Ames wins contest to explain the concept of flame in terms that an 11-year-old could understand, submitting a video that relies on creative visuals and narration; contest was sponsored by the Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University and the winner was announced at the World Science Festival. MORE

May. 17, 2012

Nicholas D Kristof Op-Ed column offers selections from essays submitted to him as part of a contest asking teenagers to recount their experiences with bullying; also lists grand prize winner Lena Rawley of Montclair, NJ, who details how she overcame vicious abuse from female classmates. MORE

Apr. 10, 2012

Defense Dept's Defense Advanced Research and Planning Agency announces 'robotic challenge,' a competition to design specialized robots that can work in disaster zones while operating common tools and vehicles; corporate and university teams will compete to enter robots in contests in 2013 and 2015, with prizes yet to be announced. MORE

Mar. 27, 2012

Students Amr Mohamed, Dorothy Chen and Sara Ma are global winners of Space Lab, a competition among students ages 14 to 18 to propose science experiments to be conducted on the International Space Station; Mohamed's experiment would observe whether jumping zebra spiders can adapt to a zero-gravity environment; Chen and Ma would seek to discover whether a period of weightlessness would increase the effectiveness of a fungus-killing bacterium. MORE

Mar. 6, 2012

Actor Alan Alda, a lifelong enthusiast of science, is pursuing a campaign to increase communication skills in the scientific community in order to promote more effective interaction with the general public; Alda is collaborating with New York's Stony Brook University on a contest challenging scientists and others to offer a clear explanation of fire, with 11-year-olds functioning as judges. MORE

Mar. 4, 2012

App City column describes several entries in New York City's 2012 Big Apps contest, in which public agencies supply data to Web developers who compete for $50,000 in prizes; winning the contest does not necessarily lead to success in the marketplace. MORE

Feb. 12, 2012

Several new endeavors challenge common complaints against classical music competitions by tweaking the concept and using the Internet to create an open dialogue among composers, performers and the public; organizers of such contests, like the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, violinist Hilary Hahn and composer David Lang, say contests are less about competition and more about providing opportunities to introduce the public to work they may not have otherwise heard. MORE

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